


Not hostile (but still a takeover)

by begoodwhale



Category: Pokemon GO
Genre: Gen, Team Instinct
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:50:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8026735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/begoodwhale/pseuds/begoodwhale
Summary: Disconnected bits and pieces and character introspection. Just who is Spark, anyway?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I tend to just kind of write as "This whole thing is an author's note, okay?" Not a lot of dialogue - more sharing my confused mental puzzling over Team Instinct's team leader.

 

Spark's not your front line guy. He's not your heavy-hitter or your second, but he's also not your lackey.

Spark's the friend who shows up in the rain with a crazy amount of takeout when you're sick, the friend who's maybe a little naive and happy enough to fling himself headlong into a hug. It doesn't matter if it's been five minutes or five years - he's _missed_ you.

Spark's the one with the big grin who doesn't always get things right the first time, but that doesn't mean he doesn't understand what he's doing. It doesn't mean he's not willing to try again.

He didn't get to be a leader by being a quitter.

Even though they're different, he adores Blanche and Candela. Sure, they tease, but he's got a wicked sense of humor under the sweetness.

He's mischievous, and maybe a little sneaky when he needs to be (nothing like managing to spring a surprise on the Professor, after all, and better yet when he manages to surprise Blanche and Candela too.) You need an honest promise or a schedule kept? He'll do it, no questions asked. He'd do it for any friend, but especially for them - but...

He gets tired sometimes.

He's got people who understand him, sure, but there are also people who think it's fine to put him down because he's not into what he does for prestige. He's in it because he adores his Pokemon, because they're what connects him to the most important people in his life, because he wants the best for them and the people they're connected to. He does it because, in the end... The trainers who look up to him - the people who listen with tilted heads and little furrows on the foreheads? They, and their Pokemon, are part of his family.

Pokemon have always been part of his family. They're what ties them together first, before emotions and hard-won loyalty and the final, gentle warmth of respect.

Sometimes, though, Spark's your friend who's a little silly, a little shy. Sometimes he's ridiculous or loud or even a little sad. Sometimes, he gets angry. Spark's your friend who's fine, usually.

Usually.

But Spark's also that kid who maybe came up in a ghetto neighborhood who can be brash, who can be uncertain, who knows weirdly specific things that you Do Not Do. Spark's the kid who knew too many things, that is, and still wound up as a grown man in the modern-day equivalent of a teens' color-gang, but he loves it anyway. Spark's the guy who gets your call and rolls up on your doorstep in the dark and comes with you to casually deal out a beat-down if someone really needs it, but in the morning he'll help someone's grandma cross the street.

He's the kid they warn you about. He's the kid no one needs warning about - everyone knows who needs to know, and the older folks mostly don't care so long as he's staying out of their hair. He does, for the most part. As long as people don't cause trouble. Maybe you're not planning on doing wrong, but if someone else does, you know exactly where to turn for help.

Spark's the one who comes up from something hard and makes good in the neighborhood where he lays his head, and doesn't focus on getting out, the one who teaches the little kids basic first aid when one of them scrapes up an elbow or trips on the root-lifted sidewalks, the one who shares his lunch even if it isn't much. Spark's the one who dreams of something better, right here, the one who knows all the shortcuts and all the gangs and uses the first money he ever wins to anonymously donate 500 pounds of food to the community hall. (Maybe they try to do a community dinner one Saturday a month, and parents who can't make it send their kids with friends or neighbors or older kids. Spark used to walk with the kid next door, and now when he's the one who's older, three kids from his hall walk with him.)

He's the one who finds things like scuffed-up Pokeballs and shows the little kids how they work. He's the one who works quietly and keeps his head down in the background and finds all the little moments really important.

Maybe he's the one who hates drug dealers (his neighbors' second son, dead of an overdose at seventeen,) and thinks it's fine to eat some of the frankly bizarre junk food from the clean-but-skeezy corner shop as a form of sustenance. (Which, well, it's not. But it's generally tasty.)

Spark's the one whose sense of personal loyalty sometimes outweighs his sense of self-preservation, because he'll follow or stick with someone he trusts until his knees weaken beyond all hope or his heart gives out. He's the one who rolls up out of the fog at five AM and takes down the Rocket goons who took over your gym, just because he can, and maybe he doesn't make it hurt, but they can read the weighty mantle of violent potential - the undertone of "this is something that could _happen_ to you," when he tells them to clear out.

Maybe he's not your front line guy. Maybe he's always messing with his phone and leaning against the wall, or he's usually got somewhere else he needs to be. Maybe he can be a little scary, really, if you push too hard or mess with the people he's fond of. Maybe he's a little silly or he blows you off if you're too serious.

Maybe.

Maybe he's just who and what he needs to be, or maybe he hasn't decided yet.

What's a spark, if not a catalyst?


	2. Chapter 2

On Saturdays, he likes to go out. Maybe to the park, maybe out to a club on occasion if it's late and he's in the mood for it - he works a lot, but sometimes on weekends he has time. So he plays silly games with his Pokemon and the kids from the neighborhood, folds little origami hats for both (skill learned from Blanche, who'd been impatient but hadn't laughed or gotten mad when he had trouble at first), heads a little parade of kids to the playground and shares tips on how to keep little Bulbasaurs and Squirtles and Pidgeys happy. Some of them might grow up to be trainers yet, and he's glad to help them however he may. They're good kids and he's always a little touched that their parents trust him with them, even though he isn't always around.

On Sundays, if he's home, sometimes he collects the kids from his hall for the afternoon, and maybe old Mrs. Maple from upstairs and the teens who aren't old enough to work and need kept out of trouble, too, and they go down to the community hall to play board games or watch a movie or do arts and crafts for a while before dinner, if the weather's not good enough to good around outside. He has... Probably too many pipe cleaner-and-pom pom Gyarados and Ekans in his office at the Professor's place. He doesn't particularly care (and it's funny to watch Serious Businessmen walk into the astonishingly frightening Jynx-and-Haunter mobile some of the teens gave him last Christmas. Those kids do some good work.)

When he's around during the school year he goes down to the homework help sessions at the community hall, too, when he can (and Mrs. Maple's a semi-retired librarian and most definitely knows all the best ways to find the most useful books - or at the very least, the most _interesting_  of the useful books.)

Sometimes he's gone for days or weeks (months, more than a few times,) but all the kids closer to his age know how to get in touch if there's an emergency. Emelia, the one with the tiny little Wartortle, even has Blanche's cell number (though she doesn't know, just that it belongs to "Spark's friend," and she's not to "test" it or prank call it.)

Not to say that nobody knows what he does or that Blanche and Candela don't come around. They're familiar faces, in whatever happens to pass as casual clothes for them, and have been for years - the kids like them well enough, though they're a little wary still. Neither of his friends has shown up in work clothes except for once. (Candela, dropping off a present for a missed birthday, and then one of the older kids had freaked completely. Candela still gets all flustered and embarrassed if he brings it up, and it's _adorable_.)

Sometimes he goes out of town and finds they've been by while he's gone, once or twice he's called out of town for an event or something important and comes home to a state of disarray that speaks of their hand in it.

Just before their "official" launch as team leaders, he goes out of town to handle some business matters on the Professor's behalf and gets into a protracted and bizarrely surreal argument with one of the gym leaders just before he comes back (seriously, he's fond of the guy and he's a good friend, but Spark's never seen such a clearly intelligent Persian in his _life_. Having an argument under that cat's gaze is unsettling, even if the Pokemon itself is generally pretty adorable, though also rather large... and maybe its limbs also mostly end in very pointy bits,) and he comes back to find that at some point Blanche came by to rearrange his whole apartment and Candela has eaten all his cereal. He's collapsed onto his bizarrely-positioned couch by the time he really notices, and he's just too tired to care. At least they didn't hide all his spoons or flip the kitchen drawers this time.

It says something about their friendship that it doesn't even bother him when they casually let themselves into his apartment anymore. There was a time in his life when he would have flipped out - stressed out - worried and fretted about what an invasion of privacy he felt it was, but these days they've all spent so much time working and studying practically on top of each other that it doesn't even factor in as more than a nuisance. But... They've never been the sort to scoff at his neighborhood or make fun of him for clinging to habits he learned as a little kid - locking all the car doors or rolling up the windows if you're going slow, or checking the trunk if it doesn't lock. (There are way too many cautionary tales to tell, and little ears hear more than most. He has a long memory when it comes to the things that need a little care, a little worry.) They don't mess with the more important things in his home or his workspace, now that they've figured out what makes his ears go red at the tips from anger instead of embarrassment - what makes him grit his teeth when he's trying too hard to be polite and can't just let it all roll off.

He doesn't really get mad at them much, just annoyed in the sort of way that makes him feel loud and a little belligerent, makes him do things like plastering Blanche's office in Arcanine-related doge printouts (Arcanine! The ARC-DOGE!) overnight, or fitting all of Candela's lamps with blacklight bulbs. (Candela, it turns out, thinks it's funny when Blanche turns on the living room light on movie night and practically glows, though, so maybe that one was more for Spark's amusement than anything else. Blanche only feigns offense for a moment, at any rate, before laughing and shoving them both over the back of the couch. Popcorn and chips fly everywhere, but even the Professor maintains that's at least twenty-five percent of what dogs are for, Pokemon or not.)

And Spark is - well, he's happy with that. He's happy to have what he does, to be able to make his friends laugh or watch a kid practically light up the first time they watch a Psyduck or an Eevee pop out of a Pokeball. Granted, he sometimes feels more like one of those parents who let their kids name all the pets than a young adult. It's how his youngest Growlithe wound up being known as Glowstick, after all. Children are ridiculous.

Okay, okay, so the Professor might raise an eyebrow at that, because Spark just might have a Pokemon he specifically named "Taminoftha" and he or she might just happen to be a Sandshrew. That's not the point. He can't keep letting the kids name poor innocent Charmanders things like "Bic" and "Clipper" and "Zippo," seriously. They all went to good homes, sure, but at least one of those trainers had laughed in his face first. He has a _nice_ face, alright? It's not for laughing in. Really. Definitely.

Right? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seen to have fallen down some very large rabbit hole and can't get out. Hope these plot bunnies are friendly...
> 
> I am so sorry about the Arc-doge bit. I'm a terrible person.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spark falls in love with the sky.

Spark falls in love with the sky a little at a time.

It's not that he doesn't notice it. He has eyes. It's just...

He spends years of his life mostly seeing it through narrow windows and above alleyways, through the hazy grasping of city light and pollution. The sky's the thing with sun and clouds in it, and it's just not that important to him until he's older. It's not a lack of interest, so much as a lack of experience. What's so great about something so far away? Light comes from it, rain comes from it, but why do people think it's so great?

He's not-quite 13 when he gets to go on a tour with his class, gets to see Pokemon in the rehab center an hour and a half away from his house. It's far enough out of the city that the quality of light is different somehow - more golden, the sky more open above the tree line.

The sprinkle of rain they get as they walk across the open field at the back of the Center feels cooler and cleaner, somehow, and there are Pokemon basking contently in the scattered light. Some of them are tiny, others are bandaged or stitched or clearly elderly, but many of them gather around the children and their tour guide as he kneels down to greet them, lean in against his legs and hands in greeting, as other, less tame creatures watch from the tree line.

There's a rainbow far above them, faint as a wish, and Spark falls in love with the sky at the edge of an open field.

-

There's a place that he goes to stay for a while when he's a little older - his grandmother's house, beyond the edge of everything else he knows, at a time when he's a little angry, almost fearful, grieving over things he can't control.

There's nothing out there, really, except darkly forested slopes and quiet life, nothing beyond his grandmother and her gentle hands and the stories she tells him about being a Pokemon trainer in days when it wasn't a thing girls did often. There are photos of grandmother with the Eevee she'd rescued from an icy roadside as a girl, a photo of grandfather asleep with Pokemon and kittens heaped on his chest.

There are pies they make, painstakingly, from his grandfather's recipes as summer glows golden: blackberry, cherry, sun-kissed peach. One of the neighbors comes by with a box of fruit and they make a particularly ill-advised attempt at a fig cake, and eventually settle with making freezer jam and preserves with the rest.

There's the old house shrine that came with the family from somewhere even grandmother can't quite remember (there's Spark, years later, blowing away dust and leaving offerings he's none too sure of,) and how everything in his head goes still and quiet and peaceful when he's standing there with her. There are the wild Digletts who shyly peek from the garden (more an orchard,) and the hills behind the house where owls or perhaps some other, more wild creatures call out, eerie in the night.

There's the porch at the back of the house where they feed birds in the morning and watch the lazy spiraling dust of galaxies on summer nights, the feeling when he sinks his feet into the sand of a creek bed only for his grandmother to push him in, laughing.

There are days filled with warmth and gentle fondness, and his grandmother's cheek pressed to his as they adjust an ancient telescope. There's that last moment of an evening on the cusp of autumn when they lean against each other and wish on stars that are too far away to hear them, and it stretches out so far that they're wholly wrapped in it for the rest of their lives.

Spark falls in love with the sky in the middle of the night, in a place that people sometimes pretend is nowhere. He falls in love like falling down a mountainside, and it fills his soul with motes of hope, with burning stars in the hours that try to crush him into ashes. Spark falls in love, and stands back up, and wears the thought of starry nights as a mantle.

-

There's a point in his life where it seems like too many things have gone too wrong all at once, where he's got dirt on his face and blood in his hairline, and what's surely going to be a black eye starting a low throb.

There's the bully who is looking a little horrified about the blood and backs away when Spark bares his teeth and makes to get back up, another bully who raises his hands and gets shut out of the crowd when he tries to back into it.

There's a person in a blue jean jacket with a cut on their cheek who leans down to check his head, even though he flinches away with a hiss, and a group of people that jerks back and scatters suddenly.

There's a thin man in a white coat who arrows through the mayhem with an angry shout and is followed by a compact blur of dark hair and pointy elbows that he only sees faintly as he stands, and then everything starts ringing and tilting.

There's standing up to people and bruising his knuckles when other people look away, because he can't forgive himself if he does anything else, and then getting shoved back unexpectedly and knocking his hard head on something even harder.

There's the man he's seen at the Pokemon Center with Pokemon leaning in around his feet on more than one occasion, and there are people he comes to know as... As family, really. Professor Willow, Blanche, and Candela.

There they are, all looming in an arc above his head when he comes to, lit like angels and twice as vengeful. Maybe at some point there's an ambulance he can't really afford, too, but he's never really clear on that point. Maybe it's an ambulance someone else pays for. He certainly doesn't.

Spark first remembers these people like this:  haloed by sky and sun and his own altered perception, and has a half-hysterical thought that they come from the heavens, that they're his guardians, that maybe he should be protecting them, too.

There's following them and working with them, and learning that they're as ridiculous as they are dignified, (and sometimes dignified in ridiculous fashion.)

Spark quickly learns that the Professor has a habit of delivering important information, at times, in a grave tone entirely at-odds with his appearance (hair disheveled, reading glasses departing his face via gravity and sheer momentum, entire body practically vibrating with excitement) and has to choke back laughter more than once.)

Blanche tends to deliver news in a straightforward fashion, regardless of the relative absurdity of whatever the matter at hand happens to be. ("The Professor had an unfortunate disagreement with a Meowth regarding a feather boa," is, for instance, rattled off in the same casual fashion as one might impart the state of the weather.)

Blanche is hard to read if you're not very familiar with each other. It takes Spark quite a while to learn how to interpret all the subtle little smirks and tilts of the head as emotion, as judgment or secret laughter.

Candela is... Candela, and expresses displeasure by pulling practical jokes (generally with Blanche's assistance) and eating whatever food in someone's house or office happens to be least convenient to replace. How's he supposed to explain the entirety of a person? Candela's amazing. Amazingly terrible sometimes, but. Family. Nothing else to be expected.

There's getting to know them and growing with them, striding out into the world and discovering a hundred million different places where breadth of the sky eclipses the span of whatever bit of earth they're standing on. There's missing home, and missing the people who are home, and wondering if they're staring up into the night at the same time as he is.

(There may or may not occasionally be a party line where they just stare up at the sky in silence, miles apart, or a group text when he's off by himself and feeling too lonely - 'LOOK AT THE SKY WITH ME?' followed closely by the best photo he can take with whatever phone he happens to have at the time (he may or may not short them out and/or accidentally cause their ultimate destruction on a fairly regular basis. The Professor just smiles when the lab assistants ask about it.) It doesn't usually take long to get a response - a photo from wherever in the world they happen to be, perhaps a text - 'Poor reception,' or - usually from Candela 'it's THREE AM WHYyyyyy?')

There's coming back from training or equipment trials with Blanche and Candela, standing next to him: a gentle smile and a wide grin, and the Professor beaming at them across the roof of the Center like they're the greatest sight in the world, and Spark hesitating for a moment because the sun is rising behind the three of them, because the light he sees inside them is exactly the same. In some ways, they're the center of his world, and he'll gladly go right through anyone who tries to convince him otherwise.

Spark falls in love with the sky like some people fall in love with other people, in a way that creeps in and fills him up and sometimes breaks him, in a way that lets him stand tall under it, and is, for that perfect moment, invincible.

-

Spark falls asleep in a place where he shouldn't, out on a research trip with the Professor near the top of a mountain pass, a half day's hike or more from the nearest ranger station. He climbs up to the flat of the ridge to see the sights and falls asleep leaning against the mountainside and basking in the sunlight.

Spark wakes to the rumble of a sudden summer storm, to mile long whips of arcing light. He thinks for a moment that it's him lightning has struck when everything in his world goes white and hot and blinding and he can't tell if he's screaming or his ears are ringing or if he's flying or falling or ---

Or.

Maybe he's rising, away from the shocked and perhaps slightly awed expression on Professor Willow's face. Maybe he's watching his falling clipboard slice an unfortunate hole into the Professor's equipment tent, too, but that won't help him as he's launched, lifted, away into the sky.

They shoot up through the storm, past the lightning, up - until the air is thin and almost too cold, until they pass the point where there's a true horizon and all Spark can see through the bright feathers and flickers of light are the glow of sunset and distant stars against the barely-there curve of the planet.

He's breathless in truth for a moment, even though some part of his brain is telling him it's impossible for him to be there (to be there, just below the edge of space and still alive,) and the bird turns a shining eye to him for just a moment. The crackle and distortion of light and air around them doesn't even register, really, and they hang there a bare moment before they fall with the sharp snap of electricity grounding, with a deep rumble like a passing jet.

Spark falls in love with the sky at the center of a storm, heart beating fast and face filled with light. Spark falls in love with the sky on the back of a bird, screaming and warm and almost breathless, and after that, nearly nothing is the same. Spark falls in love at sunset in the breach between the sky and the stars, and it's just like coming home.

After that, falling in love with the ocean is as easy as waking, as breathing, as lifting his head and looking out toward the horizon. It's the nearest earthbound analogue to space that he can reach.

Spark always stands on the edge of the ocean like it's the edge of the sky, too - endless and deep and terrifying, wide and beautiful and filled with things that could possibly kill him, and it's _wonderful_.

Spark falls in love with the sky, with the ocean, with the abrupt and breathless feeling of sudden joy, and is, for the first time, free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still have no idea what I'm doing here. Hahah. Halp.


	4. Chapter 4

In the morning, Spark wakes up like it's meant to be. Not like he's a morning person, but like he's meant to be in it.

He has a lot of days where he sits up into the sun, where the tiny window that catches the morning light seems to shear off just one little beam for him and sent it into the only gap where it gets through. The rest of the light gets trapped in the awkward nook off the kitchen (shoved full of hardy little plants and a corner table, the defunct vestibule of a dumbwaiter repurposed into a nook for his plant Pokemon to bask in,) and spills into the hallway.

Sometimes he really does feel like that little beam of sunlight is just for him. It's a small twist of fate, because he'd moved in during the rainy season, hadn't even seen sunlight in a week when he'd set up his bed and nightstand, and then he'd woken up on a lazy Sunday morning to the gentle warmth of a sunbeam. He doesn't realize that when he sits up into it, he seems to glow - all golden, haloed - but he's more pleased to see the sun than anything else.

He doesn't live in the center of his neighborhood forever - now that he's a little older, doing a little better (needing a little more space, with a passel of Pokemon at his heels), he lives in one of those odd, in-between pockets where the buildings are older but still in good repair - not outside the neighborhood, but strangely set apart nonetheless.

The building itself isn't anything fancy on the outside - solid, plain stone that speaks of old office buildings and a time when this area was a little more prosperous, but it's a place he loves at first for its location (close to home-that-was and now home-that-is) and perhaps a bit for its passing familiarity. The building and the cluster of others on this block are seemingly apart from time in some ways, but that doesn't mean he can't look out the window and see a hundred ways the world has changed around them.

The walls when he moves in are all old eggshell paint, traces of the original molding around the edges of the rooms. It has the air of a place that is a labor of love and not of money - and Spark can respect that, really. There's a strange emptiness to the apartment that slowly abates as he settles himself into the space, hangs strings of photos above his bed and puts a pair of forks and far too many spoons in the kitchen drawers, and maybe other than that he's only got two pots and a pan and a cereal bowl in his kitchen for a while.

A couple of the kids from his old building come by to water his plants since he has to head out of town for the next two weeks, and there's a giant plastic tub of cookies on Spark's kitchen counter when he gets home from the airport. (There's a much less startling duplicate of his office mobile in the kitchen window, too. It's flat-out adorable.)

Spark likes to sit in the awkward nook off the kitchen when he has paperwork to do, watching Pokemon nap in the sun or skitter down the hall playing a game. He knows a lot of trainers prefer country living, but there's something about this place that makes it impossible to leave behind.

He's joyously fond all the little kids, clustering around to ask questions, the occasionally sullen-but generally friendly - teens, and even the aunties who pinch his cheek and tell him how handsome he's gotten (and maybe Spark doesn't flush bright red or duck his head as much anymore, now that he's a little more confident.)

But there are also the guys that try to hang around behind the school with poppers and other things, and kids who have to walk home across empty lots littered with trash and needles, and - he knows what it feels like to skirt around your own school at dusk and side-eye supposedly empty alleys and lots. He knows people don't consider it a safe neighborhood, but, despite all of the things he knows are wrong, it's not a "bad" one in the way most people mean.

It's - it really is home, this place and its people, and how they treat each other, and even most of the gangs aren't particularly violent (scuffles, okay, and they don't lift things in the neighborhood - though occasionally someone does get in trouble and end up in jail, and there are some people out there who just keep ending up back in the system). Maybe they don't have an easy time of it, but they're also not the worst off.

They try really hard, and sometimes it works out well, and sure there are some people who just plain want out - but there are also people in the neighborhood who've been there thirty years of more and only say that it's important to take the things you've got and make them good, before you start thinking you need everything someone else has got. Maybe they don't need everything that other people seem to have, but it doesn't mean it isn't nice when they get to have those too. Maybe he's not the person who can cope with the thought that you can never go back home, and as much as there are other people who feel that way to him, there's only one other place that feels even slightly similar.

Spark's the kind of person who sometimes wakes up right away, mind oddly clear, or wakes up like a drunk bear, tired and possibly achy and maybe a little fuzzy on how many limbs he has. There is an in-between, which isn't where he actually wakes up most days. When he wakes up in the pre-dawn hours, he can't say he minds the way early morning air is crisp and still and awaiting the potential of the day ahead. It just creeps him out when it gets too quiet, a person used to noise and movement and living and working in close proximity with others.

Spark's the sort who likes knowing the people he shares his space with, is what - friendly as he may be, he's not a huge fan of close contact with people he's never met (he had to do the press tour after becoming team leader, okay, but that doesn't mean he was always happy about it.) If someone's been introduced properly - a friend of a friend, no problem. He can at least socialize a little bit. It's more than true that he's not close to everyone, but he still cares about a hell of a lot of people, even when that caring might only extend as far as asking if someone's okay. People he cares about and people with deep import to him are not always the same people...

Sometimes, they're very different people. The people he feels most at home with bring little notes of light into his world, set the stars  in some imagined sky like the constellations he once fell in love with.

The times when he feels at home are precious things and light up awkward smiles and heartfelt laughs and bring a tone of near-eerie brightness into his interactions with others. It brings a little brightness into other people's lives, too, and he can't quite regret what it sometimes costs him. Maybe he is a little too good at caring, and not always the best when it comes to taking care. It's alright.

Spark wakes up in the morning because he belongs wherever he chooses to belong. Finding a place to belong is a part of what he needs to find his own hard-earned trust for, what he finds faith and patience to put himself into, and takes a million little moments to very carefully protect. And maybe the people he looks after or up to can take care of themselves just fine, but maybe it's fine if he does what he can to look after them. They, after all, care for him too.

Spark likes to sit outside in the morning light, even though there are days when he can't sleep and greets the sun from the wrong side of midnight - days when he's unsettled or shaken and wants nothing more than to sleep in a pool of sunlight and let it drive away whatever he's afraid of. (There's a window seat at his grandmother's house he always falls asleep in, when he's there, in the quiet of long afternoons. In the summer he spends there as a teenager, she only laughs and tells him it's his mother's favorite spot.)

Maybe he lives through some dark days, days when everything's gone sideways. Maybe there are days when he feels like he belongs nowhere, and in particular not beneath the burning sun. There are times when he thinks that maybe some part of him flew off into the endless void when he looked into it, but those days and nights don't last forever. Can't, in the face of other people's care, like dawn in the clearest air, so sharp and bright it nearly hurts.

Spark wakes up in the morning because he makes the decision to be there, because every night connects back to the morning before and flows into the morning after. Why be afraid of the things that haunt you in the dark times, when they could be afraid of you?


	5. Chapter 5

Spark isn't the sort of person who deals in absolutes. He's a person who lives in moments - in potential, in possibility, in what is now and what could be. He loves to see how his Pokemon grow up, in the same sort of way a parent is proud - in the way where he sees where they have been and where they may go, and loves them dearly. Maybe he's sad when things don't work out, but it doesn't mean he thinks any less of them. They're family, and they deserve every happiness he can give them.

When he's in high school, Spark volunteers at the Pokemon Rehab Center outside of town. He can't manage every day, but he does what he can. He helps clean enclosures and assists senior volunteers with tours and helps answer phones. Sometimes he gets to help out with some of the Pokemon coming in, too, or work with ones that are permanent or semipermanent residents. Sometimes it's - sometimes he cries, in the hallway or the corner of the tiny breakroom, or facedown in his bed in the early hours of the morning.

They've got a specialty vet on staff, and there's the researcher (the Professor, who's insanely busy even then) who volunteers his time, too, but the truth is that they don't have all the resources they could for the work they want to be able to do. They can't lend as much help as is ideal, and sometimes by the time they get there, it's too late.

There are Pokemon there with paid care, of course - Pokemon who can't do well in an ordinary home life situation who find themselves in a stage of retirement, rather, and to a certain extent that helps fund the center's nonprofit side. But there are also Pokemon whose owners have died or who have been found injured or abandoned (and that hurts, when he looks at their little faces, because he knows little human kids who feel the same way.)

He isn't a person who deals in hard lines, except when he is.

Spark likes the idea of what could be possible, even when it's an unbelievable long shot. Ending up Instinct's team leader, years later, holds for him the strange and almost hallowed feeling that some might call a miracle and others might say is his own awed disbelief.

He knows he's got it good in comparison to a lot of kids his age - knows he's been gifted with both opportunities and the stability to be able to take every one he can manage. He isn't able to take all of them, isn't able to afford or make time for everything he might be able to do, but - but he's blessed by that, too, in some ways. He works hard, but not to the exclusion of all else.

Sometimes knowing that things are possible is enough to let him drive himself forward, even when it's painful. Even when he's not sure he should keep believing.

Spark as a kid is someone who puts up with a lot of bullshit from people who assume he comes from a better neighborhood. Whether or not it's because he's got those opportunities, it doesn't matter - it's rude, and maybe he's got a short temper in his youth.

Spark, as a kid, is someone who feels his head give that frustrated, mocking little wobble when he puts his phone down and shoves back from the cafeteria table at lunch to plant his fist in another kid's face. Spark is the kid who gets in fights a lot, yeah, but that's only because his neighbor's older kid told him that if someone gives you shit it's perfectly alright to give them a fist to the face.

In retrospect, he should probably have listened to that guy a little less. It doesn't make him any fewer friends, but sometimes, when there's blood and mucous on his face, he thinks that maybe he should've learned to throw a punch first.

But that's the second year of middle school. He gets in a heck of a lot of fights in middle school, because Brady was their older kid, the one who walked Spark and the others to the community hall and fed them whatever he had in the cabinet, and didn't care if you sprawled on the floor to do your homework. Brady, who was perfectly willing to go punch other kids his age in the face for causing people any measure of grief, and never thought twice about it.

That's the year that Brady dies, and people give their little group a damn hard time about it for reasons that have nothing to do with who he was to them, and so those people happen to get punched in the nose a whole lot. In middle school, Spark's friends are all those younger kids, and they don't always win.

Later, he's okay with that. Well, not the losing so much as with just punching people if it happens to be needed. It winds up making them a ton of friends in the long run, to be honest. There's something to be said for defending something important to you, even if you know winning is a long shot - as it turns out, there are people who respect that kind of attitude.

There's something to be said for punching people in the face, too, even if the Professor gives him a bewildered look when he says it.

  



	6. Chapter 6

  
Spark is the kind of person who loves, in some ways, like a child loves: wholly, and headlong, like rolling breathless and laughing down a hillside. Spark loves deeply where it counts, whether or not it's something one would consider a romantic emotion. He's the sort of person who still loves a thing after years, after memory wears smooth and the strength of the emotion might wane, but for him, it seldom fades away to wistful fondness.

Sometimes he finds that he's come to love only what's left of a thing - a memory, an idea of something... but that doesn't mean that he never loved it in the first place. It's not something that may or may not to exist when you don't take it out and look at it; love isn't like Schrödinger's cat. There are paradoxic things about it, yes, but it is not something which exists when you're there and then doesn't when you've closed your eyes.

Love can exist in the presence of sadness and anger, but is not something that Spark would ever be willing to sacrifice because of them. He takes his sadness and his fury and his love all together, and he holds onto that little hint of light when he feels like he's losing hold of everything else. Spark loves, and hopes, and reaches up through the dark.

Spark's the kind of person who loves in the sort of way that people have allowed to destroy them, and the worst it seems to do is - seldom and far between - break his heart. It breaks his heart in two or three, shatters off tiny pieces that seem to take years (or maybe it's a hundred years) to grow back, but hearts are amazing things. They can go on beating even when they're broken, and hope and happiness can mend in ways that other things can't.

Spark thinks of love like other people think of breathing: hardly at all, except when it's hard or it hurts - it's an abstract in some ways and definitive in others. Spark loves, at some points in his life, without knowing if it's just loving or falling in love. The sky doesn't help that definition, wide and beautiful and breathtaking, and looking out at it suffuses him with light.

Spark's ideas of love aren't just romantic love or fondness, they're frustration and sadness, they're dreams and half-heard words and memories of a million tiny moments. Spark's thoughts of love are things that maybe slip by him, a hundred thousand little things that give truth to his care for the ones around him. Spark's thoughts of love are a hundred thousand little moments he doesn't really notice - a memory of a smile, a turn of the head, a laugh. Memories and emotions are tricky things, and those of love and loving some of the trickiest.

For him, sometimes all it takes is a little hope, a little potential. All it takes is faith and opportunity, and a dream of something better. Spark loves like it will escape him (even when it won't,) has a little too much care for things he might overlook otherwise. Spark loves like he holds things and people precious beyond his own self worth... maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. Maybe the answer is just so clear that no one he knows would ever think about asking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt like we needed this today.


	7. Chapter 7

Spark walks like he's got nowhere to go, half the time - ambles along with his phone in his hand or with his eyes on the sky instead of his feet.  He walks like it's a daydream - one that says there is no rush, no hurry, nowhere to be but here and now.  He strolls like he owns the place, incautious in the back alleys around his home, now, in ways he never would have been at thirteen and half the size, comfortable and not-quite-arrogant with it.

He knows that there are still things that could hurt him out there, he just expects that, for the most part, they won't. Maybe that's a mistake, once or twice, maybe it's more times than that, but it doesn't stop him. As an adult, he's still gaining confidence he didn't know he had a need for - confidence beyond what needs for other people. Confidence he needs for himself.

But confidence to show to other people - for other people - he's always had that. Even when he was shy and awkward and uncomfortable with himself, he had that. He'll stand up if he needs to. It gets him into trouble at a variety of ages. Even when he thinks he's older and wiser.

....But.

Spark, at seventeen, walks in like he won't start a fight, quiet in his yellow hoodie, head down over books and papers and text messages that prompt sharp grins and soft smiles.

Maybe at seventeen he even looks like he won't start a fight, but he's more than willing to finish things when he finds one. He's the kid they warn you about, after all. At seventeen, at eighteen - at ages other than that, he's somehow the kid they don't have to warn you about. He's the kid you hear stories about that seem mostly rumor, things that can't possibly be true. But the school year before he goes to stay with his grandma he breaks three boys' noses for reasons he sullenly refuses to explain to anyone. He gets in fights for other people, and sometimes that doesn't end well, and sometimes he doesn't want them to.

Sometimes he gets in the same fights with the same people (and maybe the winter he turns eighteen there's some shady operation going on three streets over from his apartment and the trouble lingers on long after it closes up shop, and maybe he thinks on that less than he should as years go by.)

Maybe there's a reason that place closes up before Christmas, and maybe it has to do with Spark and his friends showing up once or twice to punch a number of people in the face a lot of times at three AM. Nobody asks. It's not the kind of neighborhood where people worry much about petty drug dealers skip town, except to wonder if they're planning on coming back. (Only one of them does, years later, and it's to a place that's far less unguarded than he's been led to believe. None of the kids that Spark looks after are fond of bullies, and they've got stronger hands to help them up and kinder cops to listen when trouble rolls in. Spark made a lot of good friends as a kid, okay, and not all of them wanted out of the neighborhood.) So, yeah, maybe Spark wound up a Pokémon trainer and one or two of the kids who used to study with him on his neighbor's living room floor wound up cops. That's fine, right?

Sometimes he feels unduly aggressive over things that other people would ignore. Maybe the Professor knows that - or - more likely, he has only some vague grasp of how and when Spark's willing to cause a ruckus, even if he doesn't quite understand the scope of it. Blanche does, though - Candela does, because they've both seen it happen: that quiet, offended silence when he catches sight of a fight outside his front door, the moment where the younger kid that's getting beat up sees him. Blanche alone has seen him get in fights over perceived injustice and in self-defense on multiple occasions, even if he's more restrained about it as an adult than as a teenager - it's kind of how they became friends, after all.

Maybe Spark just can't help it sometimes. He spent a lot of time angry, growing up, and even though he grows up to be a little more mellow, injustice and intolerance - cruelty - is his sticking point. He's not at all fond of bullies. Spark walks like he knows what he's in for, dreamer or no, or maybe it's just that he understands there's no way to get around certain things.

Spark runs like he can't get there fast enough.

He goes through all those awkward stages - when he's a little chubby and has a hard time keeping up, when he has a sudden growth spurt the summer after he turns sixteen and spends the next school year tripping and slamming himself accidentally into things, when he's older and forgets other people's legs aren't quite as long. He runs like he's got somewhere to be (runs down a mountainside and flies off into the sky on the back of a warrior, both of their heads glowing golden in the light.) Spark runs to, and from, and away (sometimes can't run fast enough) runs back to what he knows and loves and carries dreams and nightmares both with him. Some of them aren't even his.

Spark runs like he can't wait to leave, on days when he feels trapped by grief or circumstance, on days when he needs a departure from his own skin. He runs like he's got a fire behind him, and the way forward is the only way out.

Spark runs because he's been scared before, because he's been too late before, like he's always got somewhere to be. He runs like he can't live without the exhilarating moment where it feels like he, too, can launch off into the sky and soar amongst clouds and stars and scattered raindrops, wings or no, and if Zapdos indulges him with the occasional flight, well, Spark's fierce affection is only stronger for it. It's a little embarrassing when that huge beak preens his hair like a particularly featherless chick, but he can't bring himself to be angry at all.

Spark runs a little slower, perhaps, than he thinks he does, but it's usually fast enough for him. It's fast enough for tag with the little kids, and foot races with Blanche and Candela under the Professor's laughing watch, it's fast enough and steady enough to carry him up hills and across beaches, through forests and into the reaches of open plains. It's faster than dreaming, only, and in the end, it gets him where he needs to be.


	8. Chapter 8

Spark travels more poorly on planes, after, when he's been up to the edge of space and seen what could have been the end of him. Flight seems so limited this way, so confining in comparison - so strange, to be contained, when he has felt greater than all of this. Still, flight is flight - and planes are probably safer than Zapdos' back, despite the legendary Pokémon's fondness.

Planes are also incredibly inconvenient when one has a flying Pokémon at hand, particularly when they're of a certain size. After the first few times they happen to cross paths too close for comfort, they try to avoid flying on the darker nights and to stay out of flight paths when they can.

He takes a lot of planes, is the problem. Planes to events, planes to other cities and countries with the Professor and to visit other trainers and breeders. Planes - so, so many planes to places where he, well, catches other planes. He's okay with them, mostly. They're just a bit limiting.

By which he means you can't get out easily once you're in them. Oh, sure, he lives in the city even now, takes buses and subways and goes down funky, narrow little hallways built prior to modern code into tiny little apartments, but he could almost certainly get himself out of those if necessary. He can't just get himself out of an airplane.

It doesn't mean he's scared. Not necessarily.

Okay, maybe he is scared. But it's a particular flavor of fear - and anticipation. Of compounded feelings about safety and people and being trapped away from the sky while he is in it - safer, technically, than soaring beneath the stars in open air, but that's not how it feels.

It's not safer or better in the way he tends to feel so drained and unsteady after a long flight, how much worse it is if there's turbulence or a long delay, for the way it sometimes makes him feel vaguely heartsick and queasy. He hates it, sometimes. His doctor says there's generally nothing physical causing any of it, at least. That doesn't mean that Spark finds it any less offensive that he can chase nearly any Pokémon in his care for as long as he likes, but a few hours in an airplane leaves him feeling drained and wrung out.

The sky isn't a thing that should ever make him feel trapped. But in a plane, perhaps he's afraid it won't let him go.

Perhaps he's afraid it will, and he'll have no choice.

Still, he does what he must - plans extra time for travel, brings paperwork and music and other things to distract him. He sleeps, when he can, if only to avoid the thought of the sky, and how scared he is, in some long and hidden moment, of all the things it represents.


End file.
